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Reporters Without Borders said in it’s 2005 special report titled “Xinhua: the world’s biggest propaganda agency”, that “Xinhua remains the voice of the sole party”, “particularly during the SARS epidemic, Xinhua has for last few months been putting out news reports embarrassing to the government, but they are designed to fool the international community, since they are not published in Chinese.”

Archive for the ‘Doctor’ Category

TORRANCE, Calif.— Dr. Eric J. Goldberg has been researching organ harvesting allegations since attending a conference on transplantation in Boston in 2006. He is the chief medical research director of a major international clinical research corporation.

Dr. Goldberg discussed and answered questions on Dec. 22 on the issues of organ harvesting and transplantation in China with Dr. Dana Churchill, the Southern California spokesperson for Doctors Against Forced Organ Harvesting (DAFOH). It is a non-profit founded by medical doctors to inform the medical community and the public with findings of unethical and illegal organ harvesting. The non-profit was the organizer of the discussion and press-conference. Read the rest of this entry »

Former Canadian Secretary of State for Asia-Pacific David Kilgour and David Matas, a human rights lawyer, on August 22, 2008, released a new letter, describing new evidence about continued murder of Falun Gong practitioners in China for their organs.

By Ben Bendig, Epoch Times Staff Aug 24, 2008 –

New evidence of the Chinese regime’s practice of harvesting organs from Falun Gong practitioners has come to light through the admission of a Chinese doctor.

An audio recording of the doctor admitting to having taken part in harvesting organs from Falun Gong practitioners, together with a state-endorsed documentary in which the same doctor acknowledges taking part in the conversation, is “an undeniable, inculpatory admission of the harvesting of Falun Gong practitioner prisoners for profit,” say David Matas, a human rights lawyer, and David Kilgour, former Canadian secretary of state (Asia Pacific), in a letter released yesterday.

Matas and Kilgour had their investigators call Chinese hospitals inquiring about organ transplants, specifically if they could get organs from Falun Gong practitioners, the rationale being that Falun Gong practitioners are healthy, owing to their practice.

In one case, Dr. Lu Guoping at Minzu Hospital of Guangxi Autonomous Region said that his hospital used to have organs from Falun Gong practitioners, but didn’t any longer. Here is a portion of the transcript:

“Caller: …what you used before, were they from detention centers or prisons?

“Lu Guoping: From prisons.

“C: Oh, prisons. And it was from healthy Falun Gong practitioners, the healthy Falun Gong right?

“LG: Right, right, right. We would choose the good ones, because we will assure the quality of our operations.

“C: That means you choose the organs yourselves?

“LG: Right, right, right.”

He later referred the caller to a hospital in Guangzhou, saying that this hospital would have Falun Gong organs.

Where the new evidence comes to bear is that in a documentary released by Phoenix TV, Lu Guoping admits to having received the call, and also to referring the caller to a Guangzhou hospital.

However, he denies what he said, stating in the interview, “I told her [the caller] I was not involved in the surgical operations and had no idea where the organs come from. I told her I could not answer her questions. She then asked me whether these organs come from prisons. I replied no to her in clear-cut terms.”

When shown a transcript of the interview on the video, Dr. Lu claims that it is a distorted version of the conversation. However, the documentary makes no mention of an audio recording, and no explanation for how the recording could have his voice saying some things that he admits, and other things he denies saying. Matas and Kilgour, in their report of the new evidence, make the point that the documentary suggests an altered transcript, but because there is no mention in the documentary of the recording, the recording itself is not being disputed.

Matas and Kilgour sum up the evidence: “So here we have on our recording an admission from a doctor that he and his colleagues used to go to a prison to select Falun Gong practitioners for their organs. He does not just say that someone else did this. He says that he and his colleagues used to do this themselves. Moreover, we have a further admission that the voice we have on our recording is the voice of the very person our recording says he is.”

One particularly damning aspect of the documentary is that it is available through Chinese consulates and embassies.

“[C]onsequently,” Kilgour and Matas state in their letter, concerning the documentary, “it has the sanction of the Government of China. The admission is, accordingly, one which is sanctioned and approved by the Government of China and can not credibly be denied by the Government.”

Kilgour and Matas have been investigating claims of Falun Gong organ harvesting since 2006. Some of evidence includes 40,000 transplants that have taken place in China with donors unaccounted for, since the persecution of Falun Gong began in 1999. Additionally, waiting times for organs in China are on the order of weeks, while in Western countries, the wait can be months or years.

Amidst increasing international outcry over evidence of China’s systematic and large-scale organ harvesting of unwilling Falun Gong practitioners and others, Taiwan’s Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) recently announced that all doctors from China intending to broker organ transplants are banned from entering Taiwan.

The announcement came as part of a collaborative effort by the MAC, the Ministry of Health, and the Ministry of Justice to issue administrative regulations stopping transplant tourism to China and to conduct criminal investigations into illegal organ brokering between Taiwan and China.

“What kind of country does Taiwan intend to build?” said Democratic Party Legislator Tian Qiujin at an Oct. 29 press in Taiwan’s Legislature, according to Taiwan’s Liberty Times. “If we kept silent about the atrocity of killing or organ-harvesting that occurred in our neighborhood today, we children might eventually take it for granted and follow suit.”

Tien Chiu-chin held the press conference to address allegations that Taiwan doctors were involved in brokering unethical organ transplants for Taiwan citizens in mainland China.

Tien said healthy prisoners in China may be killed for their organs, not executed for their crimes, according to Taiwan’s Central News Agency. The cash value of the prisoners’ organs, which are sold to waiting transplant candidates, motivates their executions, said Tien. She decried “transplant tourism” to China and called for penalties against Taiwan doctors who facilitate it.

The Ministry of Health and the Ministry of Justice have proposed to increase punishments for Taiwan doctors who have brokered organ transplants in China.

Hsueh Jui-yuan, director of the Department of Health Bureau of Medical Affairs, said at the press conference that doctors who solicited patients to travel to China for organ transplants could face sanctions from reprimand to revoking their medical licenses.

“The Ministry of Justice says they are waiting for us to give more cases; they will conduct an investigation of all Chinese doctors visiting here,” said Theresa Chu, an international human rights attorney in Taiwan and the Asia director of the Human Rights Law Foundation, a non-profit dedicated to defending human rights.

International human rights attorney David Matas and David Kilgour, co-authors of a report titled “Bloody Harvest,” which investigates allegations of organ harvesting in China, held a public hearing in Taiwan’s Congress last October, Chu told The Epoch Times. “Since then Taiwan began to seriously pay attention to organ sources in China.”

An unnamed official of the MAC cautioned potential transplant recipients to work through legal channels. He said international media have reported that Falun Gong practitioners and prisoners in China have been killed for their organs. A recipient could be party to human rights violations.

Case in Point

One recent high-profile case involves Zhu Zhijun, chief of the transplant department of the Tianjin First Medical Centre in China. Zhu has visited Taiwan on several occasions—including March this year—to conduct evaluations on Taiwanese seeking organ transplants in China.

He and two Taiwan doctors are said to have examined liver transplant candidates in hotels in preparation for the patients going to Tianjin for transplants. Zhu’s hospital is said to be the largest liver transplant center in Asia, handling 600 to 700 transplants a year.

Any medical exchanges between China and Taiwan require the permission of the Ministry of Public Health. However, according to Xue Ruiyuan, head of the Ministry’s medical department, Zhu Zhijun had not received permission from the Ministry to conduct his organ brokering.

If the allegations that he facilitated the sale of organs are proven, Zhu can face a prison term of six months to five years if he returned to Taiwan, said the China Post.

Hsueh Jui-yuan said the Department of Health Bureau of Medical Affairs had asked the Taipei City government Department of Health to investigate Zhu’s visit and to find the names the two Taiwan doctors he worked with.

The Taiwan hospital which invited Zhu, the Chang Gung Memorial Hospital in Kaohsiung, may face unspecified penalties based on a current statute governing relations between Taiwan and China.

Theresa Chu said other Asian countries will be closely watching what Taiwan is doing to prevent unethical transplant practices. “This matter is very important,” she said.
– Original report from the Epochtimes

Stand up against the ongoing

live organ harvesting in China

I would like to thank the organizer of this rally for having invited me to speak about one of the most atrocious violations of ethical standards in medicine in the 21st century.

Doctors Against Organ Harvesting was alarmed by different reports about the latest transplantation practices in China. There is significant evidence that the recent transplantation boom in China is eventually built on unethical and unacceptable medical practices.

It is alarming how tens of thousands of transplantations were performed in the recent years in China without having a public organ donation program in place. It is implausible how transplantations can be scheduled in advance, most of the times within short notice, if organs traditionally are not donated in China.

The Chinese government admitted that most of the organs come from executed prisoners. However this does not explain the large amount of organs provided for transplantations and it doesn’t answer the question, how they can schedule transplantations ahead of time if there is no regular blood type screening for death row candidates.

To cut it short: It is beyond doubt that a living pool of donors is the foundation of the recent transplant boom in China. And there is significant evidence that this pool of living people is composed by living Falun Gong practitioners, waiting in detention to be killed on demand for profitable business.

These practices are absolutely unacceptable in all ethical standards relevant in the medical field. The Hippocratic Oath demands the medical doctor not to do harm to the patient, but some doctors in China don’t even hesitate to kill people to sell their organs.

Transplantation medicine in China has been turned into a criminal business, instead of money laundering they perform “organ laundering”: jeopardizing the lives of innocent people by stealing their organs and selling them, and thereby turning the body of a Falun Gong practitioner into money, worth half a million dollar. The cadaver will be cremated, the evidence after the organ harvest destroyed and what remains is a transplant and the money.

This phenomenon is not an internal problem China’s as the Chinese government used to say: No, it affects the medicine in the whole world.

Surgeons may send patients to China for quick transplants, desperate patients may seek help in China not knowing that they cause the death of healthy beings if they ask for transplants. Transplantation medicine in western countries loses competitiveness because their ethical standards cannot compete with the illegal practices in China.

The ethical sense in the western medicine is at stake.

But what is even more concerning and outrageous is the concept behind these practices.

The CCP uses the transplant medicine to shift the state run persecution of Falun Gong into the medical field by abusing medical doctors to violate their own professional oath. Doctors who suppose to help and cure patients are assisting in killing people! And patients, who seek cure themselves, are deceived by the CCP because they are unknowingly pulled into this crime against humanity as accomplices causing the death of Falun Gong practitioners when they ask for an organ. It is unspeakable how the CCP pulls unknowing patients into assistance of a crime.

Thousands of people from western and Asian countries traveled to China for transplants. It is definitely a problem that the medical community in the whole world should take serious and should oppose.

This violation of ethical standards maybe just the tip of the iceberg: Today it is life organ harvesting, tomorrow it might be stem cell therapy and genetic manipulation. The medical community is asked to stand up in time before the medical field faces even harsher challenges due to a lack of ethical standards in China. It is like a cancer: in the beginning one can even cure a cancer, but after some time it is too late and the body dies from cancer. Now it is time for the medical community to speak up before it is tool late.

We therefore call upon the international medical community and the governments worldwide to stand up against the ongoing live organ harvesting in China and to call for an end of these practices. An independent international investigation is necessary to verify the termination of these practices.

In NAZI Germany medical doctors were instrumental in the Holocaust, today medical doctors are instrumental in the state run persecution of Falun Gong practitioners.

BEIJING, July 12 — A Chinese doctor who exposed the cover-up of China’s SARS outbreak in 2003 has been barred from traveling to the United States to collect a human rights award, a friend of the doctor and a human rights group said this week.

The doctor, Jiang Yanyong, a retired surgeon in the People’s Liberation Army, was awarded the Heinz R. Pagels Human Rights of Scientists Award by the New York Academy of Sciences. His army-affiliated work unit, Beijing’s Hospital 301, denied him permission to travel to the award ceremony in September, Hu Jia, a Chinese rights promoter who is a friend of Dr. Jiang’s, said Thursday.

The Information Center for Human Rights and Democracy, which is based in Hong Kong, also issued a statement reporting the rejection of the travel request. The doctor could not be reached at his home for comment, and a person who answered the phone in the director’s office of Hospital 301 said the situation was unclear, declining to provide further details.

Dr. Jiang rose to international prominence in 2003, when he disclosed in a letter circulated to international news organizations that at least 100 people were being treated in Beijing hospitals for severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS. At the time, the Chinese medical authorities were asserting that the entire nation had only a handful of cases of the disease.

The revelation prompted China’s top leaders to acknowledge that they had provided false information about the epidemic. The health minister and the mayor of Beijing were removed from their posts.

SARS eventually killed more than 800 people worldwide, and the government came under international scrutiny for failing to provide timely information that medical experts said might have saved lives.

Dr. Jiang was initially hailed as a hero in Chinese and foreign news media. He used his new prestige in 2004 to press China’s ruling Politburo Standing Committee to admit that the leadership had made a mistake in ordering the military to shoot unarmed civilians on June 3 and 4, 1989, when troops were deployed to suppress democracy protests that began in Tiananmen Square in Beijing.

Dr. Jiang, who treated Beijing residents wounded in the 1989 assault, contended that the official line that the crackdown was necessary to put down a rebellion was false. His statement antagonized party leaders, who consider the crackdown a matter of enormous political sensitivity.

Jiang Zemin, then the leader of the military, ordered the detention of Dr. Jiang, who spent several months in custody, people involved in his defense say. Dr. Jiang was eventually allowed to return to his home but remained under constant watch. He has not been allowed to accept press requests for interviews or to visit family members who live in the United States, friends and human rights groups say.

Mr. Hu said that Dr. Jiang’s superiors at Hospital 301 had told him that he could not travel to New York to collect his award because the ruling Communist Party was seeking to maintain an atmosphere of social and political stability in the period leading up to the 17th Party Congress in the fall, when party leaders decide on a new leadership lineup.

“There is always some big political event they can use as an excuse to put pressure on human rights defenders,” Mr. Hu said. “The real reason is that they want to keep him under house arrest so he has no opportunity to speak the truth to the outside world.”

It has been over a year since the first witness, Peter came forward and revealed Sujiatun Hospital as one of the many hospitals in China that harvest and trade organs from living Falun Gong adherents. Shortly afterwards, an organ trade surgeon’s ex-wife, Annie, and a military doctor in Shenyang revealed more appalling details, revealing that this hideous crime is a nationwide state directive.

Jin is the fourth Chinese witness to verify the reports of China harvesting organs of Falun Gong adherents.

A Surgeon Named Yu Harvests Human Organs

According to Jin, he has a friend named Yu who worked as a surgeon at a hospital in Sujiatun before he retired. After a large number of Falun Gong adherents were imprisoned there, Yu was brought back to the hospital, working exclusively on removing organs from Falun Gong adherents.

Jin says he is from Sujiatun and he knows very well what has been going on there. The organ harvesting was performed a little north of Sujiatun No. 46 Middle School.

Jin says he was a victim of the Cultural Revolution and knows about the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) crimes. He often reads Falun Gong’s free materials containing facts about Falun Gong and the CCP and says he believes the information to be true. He has published his statement of withdrawal from the CCP and its affiliated organizations on The Epoch Times website. Jin is 63 years old. He is currently applying for Korean citizenship.

Koreans Getting New Organs from China Keep it Secret

Next to the exhibit was an elderly woman selling dried persimmons. She said that she knows a lot of Koreans who went to China for organ transplants. They are still alive, but they tell people that the organs came from their relatives because they are afraid of public criticism.

She says that she now understands where the organs came from—they were harvested from illegally incarcerated Falun Gong adherents! The price of human organs is lower in China. She says, “How could they possibly find so many relatives willing to donate their organs?”

Surgeon Yu Sanjiang at Sujiatun Hospital Verified

The Epoch Times called the surgical center of the Sujiatun Hospital to verify Mr. Jin’s story. The hospital staff confirmed that there is only one surgeon named Yu working at the surgical center and the clinic. His name is Yu Sanjiang. After Yu retired from Liaoning Provincial Tumor Hospital, he was hired by Sujiatun Hospital in 2002.

The Epoch Times reporter phoned Dr. Yu and had a short interview. He identified himself as Yu Sanjiang and said that he started working at Sujiantun Hospital in 2002. When asked about the allegations of harvesting human organs from Falun Gong adherents, Yu dismissed it as “sheer rumor.”

The reporter asked, “Since it is a rumor, why didn’t you try to clear up the rumor?” Yu said that was the management’s business and hung up the phone.

The next day, the reporter phoned Dr. Yu’s office six times, but no one answered. But a nurse at the surgical center told the reporter that Dr. Yu was sitting in his office.

Dr. Yu’s Previous Hospital Gives Inconsistent Replies

The reporter phoned Dr. Yu’s previous employer, Liaoning Provincial Tumor Hospital, and made inquiries with an orthopedics doctor, a mammary gland doctor, a cartilage nurse and medical staff from several different departments. All have verified that Yu Sanjiang retired from Liaoning Provincial Tumor Hospital.

An orthopedics doctor said that Yu Sanjiang had been a general surgery doctor before he became chairman of the cartilage department.

When the reporter phoned the current chairman of the cartilage department, he denied anyone by the name of Yu Sanjiang worked there.

The reporter also interviewed Ms. Mao, a Chinese Canadian woman who used to work at a hospital in China. Ms. Mao says that she understands why Sujiatun Hospital would hire a retired doctor such as Dr. Yu. She explains that retired doctors have more experience and that doctors hired from a different hospital would cause less attention in the hospital because no one knows them.

Sujiatun Hospital Avoids the Subject of Organ Harvesting

When the reporter was transferred to an operator at Sujiatun Hospital, the man answering the phone said there is no Dr. Yu at the hospital. When asked about the allegation of organ harvesting, the man paused for a moment and declared, “We don’t harvest organs.” He impatiently told the reporter to call back tomorrow and hung up the phone right away.

The reporter phoned the internal medicine department, a nurse’s station at the surgical center, and other offices to inquire about organ harvesting; they denied the allegation, avoided the subject or hung up the phone.

Background

In early March 2006, two witnesses, including a surgeon’s ex-wife, revealed a death camp inside the Sujiatun Hospital (The Thrombosis Hospital of Integrated Chinese and Western Medicine in Sujiatun) where thousands of Falun Gong adherents were imprisoned and killed for their organs and body parts. The reports shocked the world and caused panic in the CCP. After three weeks of silence, the Chinese authorities denied the existence of the death camp. According to the third witness, a military doctor in Shenyang, the death camp had already been relocated after the report came out.

In July 2006, former Canadian Secretary of State for Asia-Pacific, David Kilgour, and lawyer David Matas, released the report of their independent investigation, which substantiates the allegations of large scale organ harvesting of Falun Gong adherents and shows that it is a nationwide, ongoing operation involving major forced labor camps and hospitals in China. (The complete Kilgour-Matas organ harvesting report is available online.)
– original from the Epoch Times

On May 4, The Yangtze Evening News reported that China’s most famous kidney expert, Dr. Li Baochun, had committed suicide by jumping from the twelfth floor of the Shanghai No. 2 Military Medical University Changhai Hospital Building.

Dr. Li had served as Deputy Director of the hospital and as Professor and Chief Physician for kidney disease. The report said Dr. Li’s suicide was caused by depression.

On May 24, The Yangtze Evening News report was reproduced on several major websites including the website of China’s most important official media, http://www.xinhua.net.

Further analysis revealed that the cause of Dr. Li’s depression and subsequent suicide was connected to his organ transplant work.

Xinhua.net deleted the report almost immediately.

Hospitalized for Depression Prior to Committing Suicide

The Yangtze Evening News reported that an undisclosed source from inside the hospital had informed them of Dr. Li’s depression and hospitalization.

The source told The Yangtze Evening News that during the months of March and April 2007, Dr. Li was often unable to sleep. Dr. Li had begun to take sleeping pills but their effectiveness lasted only a very short time. He fainted once, but a physical exam could not offer an explanation. By May 1, Dr. Li’s depression was getting more and more serious. He was admitted to the hospital’s neurology ward and started taking antidepressant drugs.

The source also revealed that on the day Dr. Li committed suicide, he had visited the seventh floor of Shanghai Hospital where he had served as Director of the Kidney Department of Medicine. The twelfth floor houses the Urological Surgery Department which was a source for fresh kidneys for Dr. Li’s transplant work. A nurse told The Yangtze Evening News, that when a patient needs a kidney transplant, the transplant team will go to the Urological Team and request a healthy kidney.

Committed Suicide While At The Peak Of His Career

The Shanghai Hospital website bio on Dr. Li notes that he graduated from No.2 Military Medical University in 1986. He traveled to the United States for two years of further study toward a postdoctoral degree.

He was also an expert for the State Nature Fund Association, State Nature Fund Association Kidney Disease Analysis, an executive member of the editorial board of China Blood Purification magazine and a member of Military Health Technology Qualification Test Committee.

Many of the people working at Shanghai Hospital believed that Dr. Li had a wonderful life. He had everything including an excellent professional reputation, benefits, social position, car, house, kids and a wonderful future. Dr. Li’s co-workers also said that he was at the top of his career. Dr. Li was only 44 years old.

The Hospital Refuses to Comment

The locals are talking about Dr. Li’s suicide. “Everyone knows that a doctor from the Shanghai Hospital jumped out of the building,” said a resident from a nearby housing complex. The Shanghai Hospital, however, is not talking about Dr. Li’s suicide.

On May 14, the Director’s office and the doors leading to the ward of the Kidney Department of Medicine on the seventh floor of the Shanghai Hospital were locked. A middle-aged female doctor from a nearby doctor’s office appeared quite sensitive to the mention of “Dr. Li Baochu.” She shut the door immediately upon learning that the questioner was a reporter.

The Transplant Doctor’s Depression

Li’s depression before his death appeared similar to the condition Annie (assumed name) had described as experienced by her ex-husband, the former Chief Surgeon at Sujiatun Hospital.

Annie used to work at the Sujiatun Hospital. Annie has previously exposed the illegal harvesting of healthy organs from living Falun Gong practitioners at the Sujiatun Hospital.

Her ex-husband was first transferred there in 2001. During the two years that he had worked as chief surgeon, her husband had often performed several cornea extractions each day without the consent of the still living donors.

In March 2006, Annie revealed that beginning in 2003, her ex-husband had begun to be more withdrawn. He would watch TV while holding a sofa pillow, but failed to notice when the TV was turned off. Later he began to have nightmares and to sweat profusely during sleep.

After close questioning, her ex-husband had revealed to her the dark secrets of his involvement in the harvesting of healthy organs from living Falun Gong practitioners during his two years at Sujiatun Hospital.

According to Annie, because of a guilty conscience, her ex-husband had suffered from depression for a long period of time, even after he fled and had stopped performing organ extractions from living, non-consenting donors. He was extremely nervous even when driving. His life was eventually destroyed by his feelings of guilt.

Annie knew of another doctor who had worked on organ transplants from living non-consenting donors. Like her ex-husband, this doctor also fell into depression after conducting such illegal surgeries over a long period of time.

Organ Harvesting From Living Falun Gong Practitioners Shocks the World

The exposure of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) brutal killing of Falun Gong practitioners for profit in Mainland China through the harvesting of their healthy organs for transplant has shocked the international community.

In July 2006, two respected Canadian investigators announced to the world media that their investigations had confirmed that the CCP was involved in large-scale organ harvesting from living Falun Gong practitioners. The report confirmed the existence of such practices and that the practices continue in China today.

The Shanghai Hospital is affiliated with the No. 2 Military Medical University in Shanghai. It is a Level Three Grade A hospital in the military system. On the hospital’s website the Urological Department states that the waiting time for a kidney transplant is short and the success rate is high.

BEIJING, Feb. 15- The photograph and article in Tuesday’s Henan Daily could have been headlined “Happy Holidays.” Three highranking Henan Province officials, beaming and clapping as if presenting a lottery check, were making an early Lunar New Year visit to the apartment of a renowned AIDS doctor, Gao Yaojie.

They gave her flowers. Dr. Gao, 80, squinted toward the camera, surely understanding that pictures can lie. She was under house arrest to prevent her from getting a visa to accept an honor in Washington. Her detention attracted international attention, and the photo op was a sham, apparently intended to say, “Look, she’s fine and free as a bird.”

On Thursday, Dr. Gao said in a telephone interview, a handful of police officers remained stationed outside her apartment building in the central Chinese city of Zhengzhou.

“I just can’t simply swallow it all,” she said. “I want to know two things. First, who has made the decision? I am an 80-year-old lady, and what crimes have I committed to deserve this? Second, they must find out who has been slandering my name on the Internet.”

Perhaps no issue is more emblematic of a changing China than AIDS. In less than a decade, China has gone from trying to hide its AIDS epidemic to confronting it openly. International groups like the Clinton Foundation and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation have been welcomed. The Chinese government has initiated medical research, a free drug program and a nationwide public awareness campaign.

But for a Communist Party intolerant of public dissent, embracing grass-roots AIDS activists is a different matter. They often complain loudest about inadequate care and official corruption. And few people have complained louder, or with more influence, than Dr. Gao, who gained fame for helping expose the tainted blood-selling operations that spread H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS, in central China in the 1990s.

Dr. Gao was detained on Feb. 1 as she was leaving for Beijing to pick up a United States travel visa so she could attend a banquet to be held in her honor in March by Vital Voices Global Partnership, a nonprofit group whose honorary chairwomen are Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, Democrat of New York, and Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, Republican of Texas.

International organizations and the United States Embassy in Beijing soon inquired about her status. Nicholas Bequelin of Human Rights Watch saw the Henan Daily article online and assumed that it meant the pressure had worked.

“I almost fell for the ploy,” said Mr. Bequelin, who later learned that Dr. Gao was still under house arrest. “Now it appears it was a very cynical move to try to assuage international concern. They had no intention to release control of Gao Yaojie.”

Officials in Henan are famously hostile to AIDS workers. But Mr. Bequelin said Dr. Gao’s case was particularly alarming because it suggested that officials in Beijing were complicit.

He said the Henan Daily article had been posted on a Web site administered by People’s Daily, the Chinese Communist Party’s most authoritative outlet. He noted that Dr. Gao’s detention had come only three months after another high-profile AIDS activist, Wan Yanhai, was detained and blocked from holding a conference in Beijing for AIDS advocates and people infected with H.I.V.

“It calls into doubt their commitment to let the grass-roots groups and H.I.V. activists carry out their work unhindered,” said Mr. Bequelin, who is the Hong Kong-based China researcher for Human Rights Watch. “It really, clearly shows that Beijing has endorsed this restriction on Gao. They are probably worried about her going there and talking to Hillary Clinton and other people.”

International pressure seemed to have weighed on the Henan officials who had visited Dr. Gao since her detention. She said one official visited three times a day, urging her to write a letter blaming poor health as a reason for not attending the Washington ceremony. Dr. Gao said she finally relented Wednesday.

“After negotiation, we agreed that I will just say I am preoccupied and won’t be able to leave for the award,” she said. “The letter I wrote only had two lines.”

Dr. Gao said she had written it to relieve political pressure on the local health department and her family.

She was also upset with entries on a blog she recently started in which she posts AIDS cases to give them public attention. “Various posts accused me of lying and making these cases up,” she said. “Personal insults were posted. These posts were then rebutted by victims. My blog then became a battlefield.”

During the Maoist era, dissidents who spoke out against the government were brutalized or even killed. That era is long past, though rough treatment can still occur. Dissidents are now sometimes jailed on dubious charges. The authorities often tap phones and otherwise monitor people deemed troublemakers……

A group of U.S. medical doctors announced on January 31 the founding of the organization Doctors Against Organ Harvesting (DAOH) aimed at drawing wider attention to the allegations of organ harvesting of Falun Gong adherents in China.

In a press release sent from Washington, D.C., the group says that its mission is “to share with the medical community and the public at large the allegations and findings published by David Kilgour and David Matas on July 6, 2006 and other data about organ harvesting in China.”

On July 6, 2006, David Matas, an international human rights lawyer, and David Kilgour, the former Canadian Secretary of State for Asia-Pacific, published a Report into Allegations of Organ Harvesting of Falun Gong Practitioners in China, in which the two said that the allegations were true: “We believe that there has been and continues today to be large scale organ seizures from unwilling Falun Gong practitioners.”

The founding of DAOH was announced on the same day as Kilgour and Matas released a revised version of their report, which continues to affirm the allegations.

Torsten Trey, MD and PhD, one of the group’s founding members, said that the date for DAOH to go public was chosen in order to pay respect to Kilgour and Matas for their contribution in the investigation.

“Kilgour and Matas, despite many obstacles in collecting information from a country that has been controlled by a totalitarian regime for over 50 years, were able to pull together a remarkable amount of proof. They did a great job, and everyone should realize that it is difficult to collect evidence in China.”

Asked why DAOH was not formed earlier, Trey said that while the first Kilgour-Matas report was one of the biggest trigger points, their idea to form DAOH came last autumn after they had collected additional information from articles from Chinese hospitals and Chinese newspapers as well as through personal conversations with Chinese transplant surgeons at the World Transplant Congress held in Boston last July. Subsequently, the effort to form a strong team of reputable doctors and to develop a proper agenda required additional time.

‘Organ Laundering’

Based on the concept of “money laundering,” Trey said that DAOH found the need to develop a new term to describe the systematic, underground, and deceptive transplant business in China, which is based on organ harvesting of living Falun Gong adherents.

“The term ‘money laundering’ refers to using a legitimate business to provide a cover for profits earned through an illegitimate one. The systematic organ harvesting in China that is described in the Kilgour–Matas Report drives DAOH to coin the new term ‘organ laundering.'”

He said the concept of organ laundering—illegally procured organs being used in otherwise legally protected organ transplants—would help people in the West understand properly the so called transplantation boom in China.

According to Trey, although there exist many international medical groups and organizations committed to addressing general and ethical problems in medical professions worldwide, none of them specifically aims to address unethical practices within China.

“We don’t say ‘we know the truth,’ but we push for further investigation,” he said.

Trey said that DAOH members will reach out to medical colleagues via different channels, and they hope readers of their web site, regardless of profession, will join their signature campaign.

BEIJING, Feb 5 (Reuters) – China has blocked an octogenarian doctor instrumental in exposing China’s HIV/AIDS crisis from collecting an award from a U.S.-based advocacy group, a fellow AIDS activist said on Monday.

Police barred Gao Yaojie from leaving her home in the central province of Henan, forcing her to miss her Sunday flight to Beijing where she was travelling to apply for her U.S. visa.

“This completely blocks her human rights and freedom,” Hu Jia, an AIDS campaigner who lives under house arrest in Beijing, told Reuters by telephone.

“Henan officials went to her house on Feb. 1 to tell her they did not want her to go to the United States, but she did not agree to their proposal,” he said, adding that since then she had been effectively under house arrest.

Calls to Gao’s family went unanswered and Hu said her phone lines were being blocked. The U.S. embassy in Beijing had no immediate comment.

Gao, a retired physician, was among the first to expose Henan’s blood scandal in which millions sold blood to unsanitary, often state-run health clinics, making the province the epicentre of China’s AIDS problem.

She wrote and distributed material warning people of the risks of blood-selling, making her a target of local authorities fearful of the social stigma and political sensitivity surrounding AIDS.

Gao had been invited to the Vital Voices annual awards in Washington in March where she was to be honoured for her work, according to an invitation letter from the group, supported by Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, forwarded by Hu.

In 2001, Gao was barred from leaving the country to collect the Jonathan Mann Award for Global Health and Human Rights. Two years later, authorities prevented her from going abroad to receive the Ramon Magsaysay Award for Public Service.

Hu said local authorities were stopping anyone but Gao’s children from entering her home in the Henan capital of Zhengzhou.

On Dec. 19, a delegation made up of 117 VIPs from six Asian regions issued public announcements that the group would request unrestricted entry into China for a comprehensive investigation into labor camps, prisons, and the like, where Falun Gong practitioners are imprisoned.

(photo: Szeto Wah，former Hong Kong lawmaker and Chairman of the Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements in China, calls harvesting organs from living persons inhuman and hopes the international community will pay attention to this matter.- Wu Lianyou/The Epoch Times)

The Coalition to Investigate the Persecution of Falun Gong (CIPFG)-Asia delegation was formed on International Human Rights Day, Dec. 12, 2006.

Beyond Politics and National Boundaries

In a press conference, Szeto Wah, the vice chairman of CIPFG-Asia said that the group is made up of more than one hundred members, including national and local lawmakers, administrative officials, human rights activists, attorneys, medical doctors, scholars, heads of non-governmental organizations, and journalists. CIPFG members are from Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, Macao, and Malaysia.

Wah announced, “The group is formed by volunteers and is based on the common aspiration to protect basic human rights and concern for the seven-year-long persecution of Falun Gong by the CCP” [the Chinese Communist Party]. Wah is a former Hong Kong lawmaker and chairman of the Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements in China.

Wah said that CIPFG members were shocked after reading the independent “Report into Allegations of Organ Harvesting of Falun Gong Practitioners in China,” published in July, 2006, by David Kilgour, former Canadian Secretary of State for Asia-Pacific, and international human rights lawyer David Matas.

CIPFG-Asia was formed after the Australian branch of CIPFG, which was established in the end of November with over 60 members, including Australia federal politicians, leaders of non-governmental organizations, and medical professionals. Wah also announced plans to form CIPFG-North America and CIPFG-Europe.

Taiwan lawmaker Lai Ching-te, chairman of CIPFG-Asia, disclosed that the Taiwan Department of Health is working on legislation regarding organ transplantation with organs of uncertain source in order to prevent Taiwanese nationals from unintentionally participating in the killing of innocent people for their organs.

Lai also told The Epoch Times that currently more than 10 of the 25 counties and cities in Taiwan have passed resolutions condemning China’s unethical organ harvesting. Many Taiwan lawmakers have joined in CIPFG-Asia.

Request to Visit Renowned Rights Attorney Gao Zhisheng

Szeto Wah pointed out that the CCP’s persecution of human rights is widespread in mainland China. The group will pay attention to all those being persecuted in China. The Asia Delegation will also request to visit renowned human rights attorney Gao Zhisheng, who was recently arrested by the CCP, and to visit his wife and children as well. Wah said, “Attorney Gao is a member of CIPFG; we must first fight for the assurance of his basic human rights.”

Szeto Wah said that the group members understand the difficulty of breaking through obstacles created by the communist regime, but they could not simply sit by and watch the CCP’s increasingly severe violation of human rights.

Different Beliefs, Same Fate

Lam Tze Kin, the Hong Kong Democratic Party Central Committee member and convener of Hong Kong Concerns, said that although he was not a Falun Gong practitioner, as a Christian, he had seen his own religion suffer from persecution by various political powers for many years. He said that they (Falun Gong practitioners and Christians) shared the same fate.

Hong Kong lawmaker Lam Wing Yin, a member of the delegation and also a Christian, pointed out that there was no freedom of religion in China. Some church organizations have been forced to go underground in order to survive.

Szeto Wah said that the corruption under the autocratic rule of the communist regime is already a very serious problem. Combined with the inhuman practice of seizing organs from living people, the situation is even worse in China.

“To harvest organs from living persons, especially from those whom one dislikes, and to make profit from them—this is not only against humanity and human rights, it is simply inhuman,” Szeto Wah said. “We hope more people in the world will be concerned about this matter.”

More than 100 legislators, lawyers, doctors, human rights activists and non-governmental organization heads from Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, Hong Kong and Macau yesterday established an Asian branch of the Coalition to Investigate the Persecution of Falun Gong in China.

Democratic Progressive Party Legislator William Lai (賴清德), who is also the president of the branch, faxed a letter during the press conference in Taipei to the offices of Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao (溫家寶) and Luo Gan (羅幹), the member of the Politburo Standing Committee who oversees police and judicial matters for the Chinese Communist Party.

Urgent need

The letter demanded that the Chinese government allow the group to conduct field investigations into allegations of government persecution against Falun Gong members in China.

“There is a very urgent need to investigate the situation in China as persecution is happening every day,” Lai said.

The group said that the Chinese government executed 1,616 prisoners annually between 2000 and last year, but that it also completed 1,000 organ transplants annually during the same period.

“Establishing this branch means we are going to take action to defend justice and human rights on an international scope,” Lai said.

Selling organs

A report by independent Canadian investigators David Kilgour, formerly director of the Asia-Pacific Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade Canada, and human rights attorney David Matas says that the Chinese government has profited from selling organs taken from living Falun Gong practitioners.

The group did not say what it would do in the event that the Chinese government did not allow it to proceed with a probe.

The Transplantation Society , the leader in the field of organ transplantation, issued a statement on organ harvesting in China on November 6, said “almost all organs [for transplantation in China] are likely to have been obtained from executed prisoners”, which is much similar with what the Chinese government said.

The phrase “executed prisoners” suggests individuals who have been found guilty of one of the 68 capital crimes in China and then executed. But almost all the Falun Gong practitioners who are detained in China have never had the benefit of a trial. If there is any paperwork at all regarding their arrest and detention, it takes that form of the extra-judicial administrative detention that is the quickest route to China’s labor camps.

Referring to the Falun Gong practitioners as “executed prisoners,” then, mixes together those who have done nothing wrong with those found guilty of crimes. Of course, given the arbitrary character of most criminal proceedings in China, a guilty sentence is no guarantee someone has done anything wrong. But some of those executed in China have actually committed crimes. The Society’s statement overlooks this important fact: that a very large number of organs harvested in China are taken from individuals who are entirely blameless.

The phrase “executed prisoners” also suggests that those whose organs are harvested have first had the benefit of an execution. But in the case of Falun Gong practitioners, this is not the case. The organ harvesting is itself a most terrifying and inhumane means of execution, not a procedure performed after the execution is done. The Society hides the sheer horror of what is happening in China.

It also fails to acknowledge the full extent of the doctors’ crimes. Referring to the organ harvesting from “executed prisoners” does point to a terrible confusion of roles. Those surgeons who harvest organs on China’s killing fields have violated fundamental ethical principles. While a doctor’s sole duty should be to heal, these doctors have become de facto parts of the criminal justice system in China.

But the role played by doctors regarding Falun Gong practitioners is far worse: they use their medical skill to murder. The Society’s statement obscures this fundamental ethical breach. However, even to call what these doctors do “murder” understates the seriousness of their crime.

The Chinese regime has targeted Falun Gong practitioners in a comprehensive seven-year long persecution aimed at “eradicating” this meditation practice. The mass murder of Falun Gong practitioners at the hands of China’s surgeons is a form of genocide.

Certainly a motive for criminal activity is provided by the profits to be made from organ transplanting. The China International Transplantation Network Assistance Center in Shenyang earlier this year carried a list of prices for body parts. The list put the price of a kidney at $62,000, of a liver at $130,000, the same for a heart, and of a lung at $150,000.

These huge prices are set against a backdrop of wide-ranging corruption among officials, despite the efforts of the Communist Party to stamp it out. With such profits to be made, it’s easy to see how the system could be abused.

Leading human rights groups are taken aback by the scale of the horrendous allegations against China, and are trying to establish what is really going on.

“We have been trying to find out more, obviously, because the allegations are very, very serious,” said Amnesty International’s Anna Kltalahti. “I mean, if something like that would happen, it would be very serious indeed. But we have not been able to get very far in our investigations.”

Soliciting ‘Donations’

But Falun Gong claims to have more evidence. Falun Gong members in North America say they telephoned various hospitals, prisons, and other institutions in China posing as organ buyers, recording the resulting conversations.

In one such conversation — to the Mishan City Detention Center in Hailongjiang province on June 8 — a staff member tells the caller that they have “Falun Gong [organ] suppliers.”

Question: “Do you have Falun Gong [organ] suppliers?

Answer: “We used to have, yes.”

Question: “What about now?”

Answer: “Yes.”

Question: “Can we come to select, or do you supply directly to us?”

Answer: “We provide them to you.”

Question: “What about the price?”

Answer: “We discuss after you come.”

Meanwhile, a Chinese woman interviewed by Matas and Kilgour claimed her husband was a surgeon who told her he had personally removed the eye corneas from 2,000 anesthetized Falun Gong prisoners in northeast China, during a two-year period to October 2003. She said her husband later refused to continue the grisly work.

Open To Abuse

The Chinese government in 2005 confirmed for the first time that it used organs from tried and executed prisoners. To human rights groups, this is already an exploitive approach to the body-parts issue, because it implies criminals could be sentenced to death more readily in order to have their organs.

“What is already established and admitted by the Chinese authorities is that organs are taken from condemned death-penalty prisoners,” says Human Rights Watch’s Kltalahti. “And also that is impossible to monitor, because of the lack of transparency surrounding the death penalty in China.”

The legal situation in China has left the door open to abuse in the organ-transplant business.

Until July 1, there were no laws requiring written permission from organ donors. Nor did institutions have to verify that organs came from legal sources. Nor did ethics committees have to approve each transplant in advance.

The Chinese government says that nevertheless, all transplant operations took place voluntarily according to the guidelines of the World Health Organization (WHO), which includes most of the conditions just mentioned.

In July, legislation has come into force setting these conditions as legal requirements. But as Matas and Kilgour point out, implementing laws that are on the statute books has not always been China’s strength.

They say it is unclear whether this organ harvesting — if it is occurring — is backed by official policy in Beijing, or whether it is a result of greed of individual hospitals that have literally been able to get away with murder. ( END)

Changing attitudes

“Another type is the older junior high school students and the high school students. They are mostly concerned about relationships with their peers, and by that age there are some love issues there too. And the third type are mature adults concerned about relationships in the workplace.”

Zhang, 28, is a medical doctor trained in Western medicine. He works at the Jingshi Huixin Psychological Clinic in Beijing. He told RFA that he was able to establish a rapport with the many young people who came to him as clients at the center because he was quite close in age to them.

Zhang said older people tended still to be quite suspicious of counselling, while younger people were happy to attend the clinic.

“Mostly we don’t refer to people as patients, but as guests or clients. People are worried that if they are regarded as patients, then other people will think there is something wrong with them,” he told reporter Bai Fan.

“Many people think that to undergo psychological difficulties is the same as being ill. But things are getting much better in this regard. More and more people are gaining an understanding of counselling, and are beginning to understand that this isn’t a disease. Most of our clients are able to seek help of their own accord nowadays, and that’s a big improvement. ”

In the West, a psychological counsellor must undergo many years of training. But in China there are a lot of very young people coming into the profession. (to be caont’d…)

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), there is a greater incidence of mental health and psychological problems among developing countries than in the developed world. But there is a huge shortfall in the number of doctors and treatment options available in those countries.

According to WHO figures for 2005, the average number of psychiatrists available per 100,000 head of population in the developed world is 10.5, while psychologists number 14 per 100,000. But China can offer only 0.05 psychiatrists and 0.04 psychologists per 100,000 people.

China, with its population of 1.3 billion, is home to just 14,000 psychiatrists and psychologists, the same number as France, with its population of 60 million.

Thousands are in training

But the profession is growing as fast as it can. Wu Jinghua is a psychological expert at the Tianlang Psychological Clinic in the northeastern city of Shenyang.

When he started in the business a few years back, there were only two such clinics in Shenyang. But he has witnessed an explosion in his profession, with the Psychological Counseling Institute in Shenyang training around 1,400 new professionals annually.

Wu said that he currently sees three or four patients a day, and that many of them are very young.

“There are three types. The first is primary school students worried about their relationships with classmates or with their teacher, those trying to get used to the psychological environment of primary school,” he said. (to be cont’d…)

HONG KONG—China’s stunning economic growth and deepening social inequalities are ramping up stress across the population, with urban white-collar workers, high-flyers, and young people all seeking psychological help in unprecendented numbers, mental health professionals say.

“One doctor will see seven or eight patients in the course of a day’s work here,” Zhan Chunhua, a psychological counselor at the Kangning Counseling Hotline in the southern city of Guangzhou, told RFA’s Mandarin service.

“We have more than 20 doctors working here. Some of our clients continue to see us for one or two years, or even four or five years,” Zhan said.

Huge demand for counseling

Hotlines such as Zhan’s are proliferating rapidly in major cities across China, and frequently advertise their services online, with names like “The Soul’s Home,” “Kind Hearts,” or “A Burden Halved.”

As understanding of psychological issues becomes deeper in China, and demand increases, he added, China’s mental health professionals are only going to get busier.

“There really is a huge demand for these services…The psychological profession will be very important in the promotion of mental health in the future,” he told “Investigative Report.” (to be cont’d…)

Criminal Complaint in Boston Accuses Chinese Delegates to WTC of Complicity in Torture

faluninfo.net, Boston, 7/28/2006– A legal complaint filed in Boston charges directors of organ transplant centers in China with overseeing forced removal of body parts such as hearts, livers, and kidneys from living bodies of imprisoned Falun Gong practitioners. Two Chinese doctors, Chen Zhonghua and Zhu Tongyu, were named in the complaint filed on Tuesday while they were attending the World Transplant Congress annual conference in Boston’s Prudential Center. A third doctor, Shen Zhongyang, was added on Wednesday morning.

Human rights attorney Dr. Terri Marsh filed the complaint, which drew evidence from an investigative report recently issued in Canada. Included in the report are transcripts of phone conversations in which investigators pretending to be organ shoppers converse with doctors in China. In these transcripts, doctors from the three surgeons’ departments openly acknowledge that they have a supply of organs from living Falun Gong practitioners (special report: http://www.killed4organs.net).

In filing the complaint, Dr. Marsh has held that U.S. courts have jurisdiction in this case under Title 18, which allows for the prosecution of perpetrators of torture who are present in the United States, regardless of their country of origin. Dr. Marsh maintains that systematic forced organ removal from living Falun Gong adherents is a form of torture.